


back to you

by steviewrites



Series: cadamian [1]
Category: Mean Girls - Richmond/Benjamin/Fey
Genre: Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-12-28 11:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21135887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steviewrites/pseuds/steviewrites
Summary: cady helps damian navigate the path he’s on when he feels like he’s straying from it.





	back to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damianhubbard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damianhubbard/gifts).

> written for and dedicated to my damian, [grayson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damianhubbard) ♡ i consulted with him on the subject matter while writing :)
> 
> not exactly a continuation of [all at once](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18021425), but if you would like context for nonbinary cady please check it out!
>
>> **trigger warnings:**  
suicide mention  
dysphoria  
internalized transphobia

Simply put, Damian does not want to exist.

He isn’t suicidal—he doesn’t have that urgent, weighed down feeling of _I can’t do this anymore_. It’s more of just an _I’m so tired and wish I could fade into nothingness and not have to think or feel or move for a while, possibly ever again _feeling.

But as much as his mother tries to understand where he’s coming from, if he attempted to explain in those words she’d have his therapist on the phone instantly. Because while that’s all it means to him, Ms. Hubbard hears a roughly translated _I want to kill myself_.

They’ve been down that road before. He knows himself pretty well, can differentiate between what he’s feeling now and how _that _feels, and can say with ninety nine percent certainty he doesn’t actively want to die.

But he also knows it’s easy to slip into the shadows of his mind even like this.

“You want DQ?” his mom is asking, at the stoplight right before the left turn that will take them to the Dairy Queen up ahead.

He’s been staring out the window so long his wrist hurts when he goes to scratch the back of his head like he has to think about it. “Not today,” he tells her quietly, and her sad little pout of concern in his peripheral makes his chest constrict.

She never has to ask. They always just go, pulling up in their favorite spot and ordering their favorite Blizzards, a private celebration of yet another successful doctor’s appointment. It’s been their tradition since week one. He can’t remember what number this is.

Ms. Hubbard puts her soft, aging hand on his leg, just for a moment, then it returns to the wheel when the light turns green.

The sky is overcast when they make it home, and he feels the distant thunder rumble in his stomach, and it has nothing to do with how he basically skipped breakfast. His mother lets him walk ahead of her, already giving him the space he needs. The elevator ride up to the fifth floor is silent, and so is the walk to 532. She unlocks the door and he slips inside, stalking off to his room down the hall, and he’s crying before his door is fully shut.

* * *

His thigh hurts. He changed out of jeans and into sweatpants, but his stupid thigh hurts like it always does after he gets the shot.

Damian grits his teeth when he nearly messes up the bracelet he’s been threading for the past thirty minutes, exhaling in frustration out his nose as he straightens it to ensure he doesn’t. His eyes still sting from crying and his throat will be prickly for a while, since he’s trying not to completely melt down. It seems so silly and babyish. What is he crying for? He’s supposed to be euphoric like he usually is after getting his injection. He’s feeling the exact opposite of what he should.

His phone dings with a text, startling him, and he grabs it aggressively to see who’s bothering him. He softens, however, eyes glazing over again, when he sees Cady wrote, asking how it went with lots of supportive heart emojis.

He has to cover his face with his hands for a minute. Of course she would ask, probably has the dates for his appointments marked on her calendar. Every week on Thursday.

_Good, _he writes back, and she sends a frowny face and inquires what’s wrong. He digs the heels of his hands into his burning eyes, unsure how to respond. He knows but he doesn’t know. The storm inside him counters whatever is brewing out there.

When she goes without a reply for five minutes, she evidently decides to take matters into her own hands, because she lets him know she’ll be there in twenty and to move whatever pile of clothes is sitting on his bed.

He laughs wetly, making the effort to get up from his desk chair to do just that, so she’ll have a spot to perch on his mattress like a friendly little bird who pops by to say hello.

Damian continues his bracelet, occasionally glancing out the window and hoping it won’t begin pouring until she gets here. He’s lost count of the amount of times she’s risked getting grounded to trudge through the rain on her bike just for him.

If it was anybody else, he would’ve pretended to be fine. But when he’s not entirely sure what is going on in his head, Cady is the person he wants near him; not to figure it out for him, but so he has a reason not to let those shadows seize him by the throat.

By the time her polite knock sounds at the front door, he is locked in a sort of determined, foggy trance, meaning his mother answers it for him. Damian vaguely processes their voices in the hall, equally delighted to see each other. He’s pretty sure in whatever alternate universe where him and Cady have a permanent falling out (a thought that nauseates him), she’d keep in touch with his mom, and vice versa. He’s come home from choir some days to find them on the couch watching reality TV while they wait for him.

“He’s in his room,” Ms. Hubbard informs Cady in a whisper, like she’s warning her.

But Cady Heron is not afraid, and he counts the steps she takes to reach his door. She raps at it softly, singing his name so sweet that alone makes him almost start crying.

“It’s open,” he says automatically, finally looking up from his work as she appears, like a guardian angel materializing in his doorway.

“I brought Sour Patch Kids,” she announces, breezing in and nudging the door shut with her foot. He spins in his chair to face her, mustering a weak but appreciative smile.

She flops down right where she always does, at the foot of his bed between the post and pile of laundry. “It started raining just as I walked in,” she muses, and sure enough, rain is angrily pattering at the window.

“Thank you,” Damian murmurs, dropping his eyes to his lap, feeling a rush of guilt and shame for not insisting he’s fine so she wouldn’t have had to do this.

“Of course, bapple.” She reaches into her backpack and tosses the new bag of candy at him; reflexes a little slow today, it hits him in the chest then tumbles to his hands, coaxing a laugh out of him.

Sighing, he tears it open and eats a blue one. They sit there quietly for a bit, listening to the rain fall against the side of the building. Cady crosses her ankles and swings her legs, and he leans back in his chair as he picks out the blue and yellow candies first.

He feels better, just enough. The sadness still weighs heavy on his shoulders, a boulder in the center of his chest. But she’s here; that will always be enough.

“How’s your day?” he asks after a while, and she makes a neutral noise.

“All right,” she answers, not sounding too interested in discussing herself. She fixes him with one of her quiet little stares then, and she’s probably the only person who can look at him like that and not make him uncomfortable. Likely because there’s no judgement or pity; just worry, and love. Lots of love.

Cady just has a way of caring that doesn’t suffocate him.

“What happened?” she inquires following another pause, and he has to bite his tongue so he won’t break down, passing it off as too much of the bittersweet candy.

“Nothing,” he admits, putting the bag on his desk and clearing his throat. Now she tilts her head at him, eyebrows raised so he knows _she_ knows he’s full of shit. The look on her face is so impish that he has to laugh.

“I believe you,” she says after, though he senses the _but _coming, “but you’re still sad.”

“Gee, how could you tell?” he mutters jokingly, arms folded.

Cady rolls her eyes. “You know you can tell me anything. About how you’re feeling and stuff. I don’t even have to give advice, just…shut up and listen.”

“I know,” he replies affectionately, bumping his socked foot to hers. Of course she’s wearing the dinosaur patterned pair he got her for her birthday. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Except it is, and you know it,” she argues gently, and he can’t make eye contact. “You know it’s okay to feel things. Big deal or not.”

He scrubs a hand down his face, sighing in frustration at himself. “Yeah,” is all he can muster, unsure what he should do. She’s not his therapist, he doesn’t need to dump every thought onto her—but she biked through the rain to be here for him, is offering to be a shoulder to cry on since he very clearly needs one, and he knows in his heart she wouldn’t have already done the most if she couldn’t handle it.

He just feels bad, always going through something and relying on other people to help him. It’d be different if he had another trans guy to talk to, and while Cady is nonbinary, there’s a certain line she doesn’t know how to cross. Their experiences are similar, but not the same.

But she’s his friend, has a better understanding of these things than Janis, at least, bless her; so after all the help and compassion he gave her during her gender identity crisis, he owes it to himself to accept the same in return for once.

She smiles when she sees him visibly start to give in, and kicks her sandals off before waving him over, then unceremoniously shoves his laundry onto the floor.

“Thank you,” he deadpans, too numb to the world to care.

“Turn on your pretty lights,” she tells him, pointing to the string of unlit rainbow lights on the ceiling. He does so, casting the small room in a colorful glow, then goes to join her on his bed, where she’s claimed temporary ownership of his stuffed Pusheen. He is hit by a wave of fatigue as soon as he lays down beside her, but is soothed by the drum of rain and warmth of her presence next to him.

After a while his voice floats back to the surface and he hears it say, more defeated than it should be, “I hate that this is my life.”

His eyes have drifted shut, but he can just picture the look on her face. There’s a pause, then her little hand touches his arm, and his throat closes up terribly fast.

He can cry in front of her without shame, he knows that, but simply wants to spare her the ugly mess for now. He pulls it together enough to elaborate, though he likely doesn’t really need to because it’s Cady and she understands everything, “Why do I have to…stick a needle in my leg every week to be a man?”

“You were before,” she reminds him gently, and anyone else saying that would make him want to punch a wall.

“I’m so jealous of all the guys at school,” Damian continues, muttering under his breath since it’s the loudest he can speak without breaking down. “They’re so fucking lucky and they don’t know how fucking easy they have it. It pisses me off.”

She squeezes his bicep supportively.

“And I know I’m lucky, too, not everybody gets to be on T,” he adds guiltily, as if she’s going to think less of him for doing what she wants by having feelings. “But even though I look more like them now… Every time someone looks at me, they all know I’m different. You can’t tell me apart now from the cis guys in my choir, but they know what I am.”

“A man,” Cady insists, and he inhales shakily.

“Yeah. But not a man like them. Not a girl like, say, Janis—a man, sure, just not like them.” He bites his tongue, overwhelmed by a wave of something equal parts angry and humiliated.

_Not fair, not fair, not fair, _he remembers thinking, age fourteen, pre-T, chest constricted by both envy and his binder as he glanced around at his choir troupe. Stupid boys, stupid cisgender boys, joshing and laughing and being stupid teenage cisgender boys. Boys who wouldn’t go home and shower with the lights off, boys who wouldn’t lie to their mom’s faces when asked how their day was, boys who could go to bed that night in possibly just their briefs without thinking twice about it.

Boys like _them_. They’re their own kind. And from day one Damian accepted he’d never be _like them_. A man in his own way, just not a man their way. They’ve supported his transition, they clap him on the back like _real men_, like he’s a _real man_, they don’t call him slurs or push him off to the side or make him feel less than. They’re good boys. Becoming good men.

But they don’t know. They don’t get it. They can call themselves the greatest allies in the universe simply for not being ignorant assholes towards him. But they don’t get it. They don’t get how his mom has had to work extra shifts for years so they can afford to put him on T. They don’t get how he had to physically force his chest to be flat before then, or even now how he’s still self-conscious of his slightly changed torso. They don’t get any of it.

His hands still aren’t square enough, and every now and then his voice will do something weird, and only just recently has he begun facing the mirror again.

None of those guys can relate. They don’t know. They’re his friends, but they don’t know.

Stupid boys. And then there’s Damian, the _other _boy.

And yet he feels like the most stupid one of all, because he has to get shots and eventual surgery to change how his body works and looks, because he used to come home from choir and lock himself in the bathroom and just cry because _not fair, not fair, not fucking fair_—because his own thoughts, his own mind, have weaponized themselves against him for as long as he can remember. Telling him he looks like _this_, reminding him he’ll never be like _that_.

Maybe he’s lucky solely because he’s still alive. And he is grateful, truly, for the opportunities he’s been given, for the love of his mother, the protectiveness of his fellow art freaks. But sometimes he has to wonder why him, for all of it.

And so he’s ravaged by guilt, remorse filling up quicker than the gutters outside; guilt over his perpetual sadness, the fact he’s currently laying here being upset he has to be on testosterone rather than having been born with it. But he doesn’t know how to make it stop. How to shut himself up and be happy instead.

Cady is running her fingers through his curls, just at the top so she won’t pull at his scalp. She doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need her to. Not yet.

“It’s okay that you’re sad,” she whispers after many minutes of tense silence. “I’m sad for you. And it’s okay. You’re allowed to be about this for whatever reason.”

“Doesn’t feel like I am,” he mumbles, exhausted.

“You are,” she insists. “Nobody expects you to be super happy and positive all the time. That’s not realistic. Your life isn’t a badly written WattPad fanfiction where the author has no clue what they’re doing,” that makes him laugh, because at least that’s true, “you’re a human being first. Humans feel a lot of things, it’s what we do best.”

“I know,” he says quietly. “You’re right, I know. I just feel bad.”

“About what specifically?”

He shrugs uncomfortably. “Being like this. Needing all these things to make me who I am but not being super psyched about it right now.”

“If the excitement is wearing off, that’s not a bad thing,” Cady tells him. “The first few times, I know you must’ve been on cloud nine. But it’s been a while since then, almost a couple years, right? So to finally be, like, a little down about it, I think that’s normal. Reality sinks in a bit.”

“Yeah, only reality has been sinking in since I was eleven.” He clenches his jaw, looking at his ceiling. “And that’s just my life. Over and over again. Constant reminders, things I need to do. Reality check, reality check, reality check. That’s every time I see some topless jock in the locker room. Every time I have to fucking…stab my thigh with a needle.”

Now his voice trembles, remembering how it was more difficult than usual today, so much so that a nurse offered to do it for him.

But real men do things by themselves, don’t they? Even when their hands shake?

He rubs his thigh where it hurts. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of myself,” he murmurs, but it sounds like a lie even though it isn’t. “I just. I don’t know. Right now I feel like garbage.”

She nuzzles her nose against his shoulder and hugs his arm with both of hers. And it helps.

“What can I do, then?” she asks after a few minutes of somber silence.

He shakes his head, feeling even more guilty over unloading on her despite the fact she literally came over so he could do just that. “Nothing. But I appreciate you being here.”

“Always, babe,” Cady vows for the thousandth time. He feels a bit better, not by a lot, but enough, and hearing that is nice. He knows he can count on her, either to listen or just cuddle his arm to death.

His mind wanders a little, transporting him to a future time where they’re on his bed but in a different house, in a different city, and his chest is completely flat and he’s got scruff growing in and she’s next to him still. The rainbow lights will have moved in with him, and it’s getting dark, and she’s playing some dumb video on her phone, a favorite of theirs that by then they haven’t seen in a while. She’s laughing, and so is he, because it’s not really all that funny but to them it still is.

Maybe Janis would come by later, and they’d have takeout in his living room, the lights of New York City sprawling outside his window. A movie they all cherish would play on the TV. Their laughter is the same. Bracelets Cady made for him now still adorn his wrist, and he’d be in a graphic t-shirt Janis bought for him in real time, last week.

He can breathe in that shirt. It’ll be faded years from now, but he’ll keep wearing it, too. And when he glances over at them later on, and Cady’s nodding off on Janis’s shoulder, and Janis’s hand has gone limp in his, he’ll be reminded he’s okay. They’ll stick around for him.

But in order for that to happen, he has to stick around for himself, too. He wants it so much he’ll refuse to give in to anything else. He has time to grow, and it will be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! kudos and comments are fetch ♡
>
>> **find me:**   
[twitter](https://twitter.com/wantingmylove)   
[tumblr](https://cadyjanis.tumblr.com)


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